AS CRITICS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED, Book VI of Edmund Spensers Faerie
Queene features some of the most supremely metapoetic fictions in the
entire poem. (1) In particular, critics have explored, on the one hand,
the Petrarchan significances of Mirabella and Serena in cantos vii and
viii and, on the other, the reemergence of pastoral in cantos ix and x.
(2) However, a scholarly emphasis on the episodic structure of Book VI
has prevented us from recognizing anything more than a loose connection
between these meta-literary moments. (3) By charting the continuity
between these self-reflexive episodes, I argue that Spenser represents a
powerful tension between the Petrarchan and pastoral modes. In doing so,
I build upon Colin Burrows observation that "The Faerie Queene lets
different genres encounter, unsettle, and even assault each other."
(4) While the sudden reemergence of pastoral in Book VI has been
understood as just such an assault upon epic, I maintain that the
conflict between pastoral and Petrarchism is similarly significant. (5)
Through Calidore's courtship of Pastorella, Spenser exposes
Petrarchism's characteristic violence against self and other,
presents pastoral as a means to contain Petrarchan violence, and makes
that containment fundamental to his epic conclusion. (6)

Although Petrarchism has proven to be an exceedingly flexible and
even unwieldy term, it remains an essential category for understanding
Spenser's participation in Elizabethan literary culture. (7)
Petrarch's own literary career and its Renaissance reception are
far from straightforward, (8) yet certain characteristics would become
especially important for his English heirs: a complex discourse of
subjectivity, often applied to the painful experience of unrequited
love; an idealizing and frequently idolatrous representation of the
beloved; and particular poetic devices like the blazon and paradox,
profoundly associated with Petrarch though not originating with him.
Above all, the thematic and formal division out of which Petrarch
constructed his revolutionary poetic voice would become a touchstone, if
not a roadmap, for future authors.

Petrarch presents this fragmentary form of writing as a necessary
response to competing material and spiritual claims upon the
individual--what Thomas Greene vividly describes as "the
distractions of his clustered motives"--as well as to the cacophony
of contradictory texts that comprise the theological, philosophical, and
literary canons. (9) Many of Petrarchs imitators, though, seem to
downright indulge in this "poetics of fragmentation." (10)
Since Nancy Vickers's influential essay on the blazon, critics have
emphasized the symbolic violence of the Petrarchan tradition. While
Vickers focuses on the violent representation of the (almost invariably
feminine) other, Cynthia Marshall has examined a corresponding species
of "psychic fracture" that "replicates and prolongs the
undoing of the ego or self, delivering jouissance through forms of
wounding, penetrating, and dissolving." (11) Petrarchan poets
exhibit an orgasmic incapacity for self-containment that subsequently
produces pleasure for the reader by allowing him or her to experience
vicariously this "shattering of the self." However, Marshall
identifies Spenser as an outlier among Renaissance authors, based on the
romantic fulfillment that closes his 1595 marriage volume, which
suggests that he may be more wary of these self-shattering pleasures
than many of his contemporaries and seeks instead to pick up the pieces
left by Petrarchan poetry. (12) Throughout his corpus, Spenser attempts
to resist the seductive dangers of Petrarchism, and he thematizes this
struggle in Book VI.

Against the fragmentation and self-shattering violence of
Petrarchism, Spenser sets an ethical poetics of containment. In the
early modern period, self-containment was a cultural imperative
undergirded by humoral, philosophical, and religious discourses. The
perturbations of the passions were always potentially unsettling, but
containment offered a means to minimize the risk of self-dispersal
without denying the value of affective experience. (13)
"Contain" could connote "enclose" or "hold
in" and thus could be seen as an attempt to restrict the passions
by impeding their flow--somehow clogging up the porous,
"leaky" Galenic body. More modestly, though,
"contain" suggests the ability to regulate the passions in
such a way to "retain ... a certain state or order" and
thereby "sustain" the self. (14) Such containment was both
etymologically related to and conceptually intertwined with the positive
affect of contentment. (15) The word "content" derives from
the Latin confiriere and the past participle contentus, meaning
"contained, limited, restrained, whence self-restrained,
satisfied." (16) Comparable but by no means coequal to Stoic ideas
of self-mastery and tranquility, containment and contentment are dynamic
conditions requiring moral vigilance, emotional intelligence, and
constant (re)attainment. Authors of the English Reformation in
particular promote these values as an affective alternative to Calvinist
despair, a way to balance "the disproportion between self and
world" that Andrew Escobedo aligns with Protestantism. (17) For
Spenser, the interwoven concepts of contentment and containment bear all
of these broad cultural significances, but in Book VI he invests them
with a distinctive metapoetic valence. Articulated by the Elermit and
actualized in the shepherds' community, Spenserian containment
combats Petrarchism.

In his pastoral cantos, Spenser presents contented containment as
the antidote to and antithesis of Petrarchan fragmentation. Petrarch may
be "unrepentant" in his depiction of powerfully unsettling
emotions, but Spenser counters Elizabethan Petrarchism with pastoral and
explores instead the psychological and artistic potentials of affective
containment. (18) As a firmly established vehicle for ethical,
religious, and cultural commentary, which George Puttenham famously
describes as the "ability to glance at greater matters,"
pastoral lent itself as a medium to engage both Petrarchan poetics and
early modern discourses of containment. (19) In practice, of course, the
Petrarchan and pastoral modes were thoroughly intertwined by the late
sixteenth century, owing in large part to the popularity of Jacopo
Sannazaro's Arcadia and Spenser's own Shepheardes Calender.
Within his allegorical narrative, however, Spenser is able to
conceptually isolate these modes in order to parse out their points of
contact and conflict. That is, although pastoral and Petrarchism can be
treated as congruent or coincident, Spenser pits them against one
another. In particular, the characters of Calidore and Pastorella become
mechanisms by which Spenser can defuse a literary mode that threatens
readers, writers, and pastoral itself. In the corresponding cantos,
Spenser acknowledges the various assaults upon selfhood (from within and
without) that attend early modern existence--and thus tacitly agrees
with Petrarch--but he also attempts to defend against them. Spenser
mitigates the threats of fragmentation and militates against a
Petrarchism that has helped to perpetuate, and not merely express, those
threats.

In the following section, I show how Spenser's representations
of the Hermit, Mirabella, and Serena in cantos vi through viii introduce
an urgent need for self-containment, particularly in the face of
pervasive Petrarchan threats. (20) In the penultimate section, I examine
Calidore's narrative from canto ix onward as continuous with the
preceding cantos and their critiques of Petrarchism. Consequently, I
analyze Calidore's entrance into Melibee's shepherd community
and his wooing of Pastorella as an allegory of literary modes--a fictive
representation of Spenser's own attempt to contain Petrarchism with
pastoral. While decades of criticism have discussed Spenser's
poetry with regard to "the transformation of power relations into
erotic relations," I examine the erotic relation between Calidore
and Pastorella as a figuration for the relationship between literary
modes. (21) Finally, I situate Calidore's victory over the brigands
and partial victory over the Blatant Beast in relation to Spenser's
treatment of those modes and concerns about his own authorial legacy.
Ultimately, my analysis complements our readings of Book Vi's
individual meta-literary fictions, complicates common interpretations of
its episodic structure, and causes us to revaluate the role of
often-overlooked characters like Coridon and the brigand captain. Most
importantly, I offer a new conceptual framework for understanding
Renaissance literary modes, in which pastoral and Petrarchism make love
and war perpetually in the work of the premier Elizabethan poet.

PETRARCHAN CRISES OF CONTAINMENT IN FAERIE QUEENE VI

Spenser begins canto vi with the Hermit prescribing
self-containment as a remedy for the wounds inflicted by the Blatant
Beast. John Bernard calls this remedy "too vague to be
useful," but, as we shall see, the Hermit introduces issues that
will come to define many of the meta-literary sequences that follow.22
In this episode, which concludes with the first description of
Mirabella, Spenser initially stresses that Serena and Timias's
bodily wounds are merely signs and symptoms of the inward damage that
the Blatant Beast and "infamy" have wrought upon them
(vi.1.3). (23) When the Hermit realizes that the Beast's victims
are "past helpe of surgery," Spenser registers the nature of
the affliction with an insistent vocabulary of inwardness: "He
found that they [the wounds] had festred priuily, / And ranckling inward
with vnruly stounds, / The inner parts now gan to putrify" (5.2-4).
To "rule the stubborne rage of passion blinde" (8), the Hermit
provides "counsell to the minde" (9) and tells his patients
that the only remedy, like the illness itself, lies "in your
selfe" (7.1). The Hermit's prescription, however, consists of
ways to moderate their relationship to the outside world. To heal the
inner contents of the self, the wounded need to exercise their
"outward sences" to "restraine" themselves and
"containe" their "fraile affection" toward external
goods (and evils) (7.6-9). (24) The Hermit's language suggests that
Serenas and Timias's desires have led them to transgress the proper
boundaries of the self. (25) Indeed, Spenser earlier states that the
Hermit could apply "sage counsell" that "could enforme,
and them reduce aright, / And al the passions heale, which wound the
weaker spright" (3.7-9). A. C. Hamilton glosses "enforme"
and "reduce" as "instruct" and "lead
back," respectively, but the former word also means "form,
shape, ... put into proper form or order," while the latter has the
physical sense of "contract ... confine." (26) The Hermit
seeks to reform and re-form his sickly auditors, using his counsel to
confine them and teaching them to contain themselves. The Hermit's
closing prescription, including the recommendation to "Abstaine
from pleasure, ... / Subdue desire, ... / [and] Vse scanted diet"
(14.5-7), constitutes an ongoing navigation of self and world, inside
and outside. He reasserts the boundaries of the self, permeable though
they may be, in order to protect the psychophysiological health of the
individual and promote ethical engagement with society.

Spenser underscores the urgency of the Hermit's regimen of
self-containment by stripping Timias of his name following the attack of
the Blatant Beast--a unique variation on his standard naming practices
in the poem. Timias is last named at VI.v.23.2, when Arthur rescues him
from Defetto, Decetto, and Despetto. (27) From here onward, Timias is
referred to only as the "Squire" (25.6), "that gentle
Squire" (39.7), or some variant thereof. Timias experienced a
similar obscuring of identity in Book IV after being spurned by
Belphoebe: his Petrarchan abjection altered his appearance so profoundly
that Prince Arthur failed to recognize him. (28) In Book VI, though, the
narrator himself seems to be affected, failing to name the character for
the remainder of the poem. This omission suggests that the assault of
the Blatant Beast has compromised Timias's very identity. The
character formerly known as Timias becomes blurry, a shadow of his
former self and a figure for the "radical ontological
instability" immortalized in Ovid's Metamorphoses and
Petrarchs Canzoniere. (29) However, unlike Verdant in the Bower of
Bliss, to whom Spenser restores a name after Guyon and the Palmer have
separated him from Acrasia, despite the fact that his "braue
shield, full of old moniments" had been "fowly ra'st,
that none the signes might see" (II.xii.80.3-4), Timias never
recovers this aspect of his textual identity.

Moreover, the elderly hermit through which the poet invokes
self-containment is not only a moral exemplar and conventional character
of chivalric romance, but also an author-figure, who recalls
Spenser's own professed practices. Consequently, Spenser presents
containment as a literary principle, in addition to a physiological and
philosophical one. When faery pharmaceuticals fail him, the Hermit uses
"the art of words," which he "knew wondrous well,"
in order to "frame" his "fit speaches"
(VI.vi.6.2-3). The Hermit's artful framing of his speech
precipitates the formation of his audience, who he hopes to
"enforme" and "reduce aright." In the Letter to
Ralegh, Spenser similarly describes himself as having
"fashioned" The Faerie Queene in order "to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" (7-8).
(30) For both the Hermit and Spenser, the "art of
words"--whether in the form of "fit speaches" or a
"continued Allegory" (Letter to Ralegh, 4)--has the power to
remake readers and listeners. Serena and Timias require just such an
artistic intervention; at the end of the prior canto, they "So
faint and feeble were, that they ne might / Endure to trauell, nor one
foote to frame: / Their hearts were sicke, their sides were sore, their
feete were lame" (v.40.7-9). While the Hermit can craft full
sermons in Spenserian stanza form, these characters can barely frame one
lousy foot. Indeed, both "trauell" and "foote" echo
their literary resonances from the first two stanzas of the Book's
proem. (31) The violence wrought upon these characters by the Blatant
Beast has rendered them unserviceable to Spenser's allegorical
narrative, so the poet dispatches an authorial hermit to whip them into
shape.

Furthermore, the methods of Spenser and the Hermit reflect broader
early modern understandings of poetry as an instrument to manipulate
affect for ethical ends--directing, inciting, and containing the
emotions as necessary. In the Letter, Spenser explains the use of his
"darke conceit" as a means of "pleasing" his readers
and producing a "delight" that will encourage them to continue
reading (4, 9, 10). The Hermit, too, applies his "art of
words" for the emotional and moral education of his audience.
However, while Spenser in the Letter to Ralegh seems most concerned with
provoking pleasure with appropriate objects of delight, the
Hermit's counsel centers on the complementary lesson of emotional
moderation, of affective containment. This affective ideal does not deny
the unsettling experience of the passions or outright reject a
Petrarchan sense of fragmented selfhood so much as it sets out to repair
the fragments as best as possible. Reflecting upon the difficulty of The
Faerie Queene's nominal project in a post-Petrarchan literary
climate, Greene observes, "The process of fashioning is frustrated
by the inconsistency of the clay amid the quicksand of history."
(32) Containment (and later contentment) fosters a more solid footing
for Spenser's artistic objectives. More than a Schoenfeldtian form
of self-fortification, containment accrues markedly literary
significances. (33) The succeeding cantos provide an expanded gloss on
the Hermit's prescriptive poetics, as Spenser situates the wounds
of the slanderous Beast among problems of Petrarchism. (34)

Although the Petrarchan overtones of Mirabella and Serena's
stories are well documented, it is helpful to consider briefly the
contrast Spenser sets up between the Hermit's ideal of containment,
on the one hand, and their distinctly Petrarchan fragmentation, on the
other. The fullest realization of the cruel, willful Petrarchan mistress
in Book VI, and perhaps in the entire Faerie Queene, Mirabella
absolutely opposes containment. (35) While the Hermit had advised his
patients to "bridle loose delight," the young Mirabella seeks
only to "loue her owne delight" (VI.vii.30.9). The Hermit
stressed the importance of individual willpower in curing the wounds of
the Blatant Beast, but Mirabella perverts these qualities into a radical
narcissism. The Hermit had hoped to "reduce" Timias and
Serena, but Mirabella "grew proud and insolent" in self-love
(29.1, emphasis added): "She was borne free; not bound to any
wight, / And so would euer liue" (30.8-9). Because the "Ladie
of her libertie" will not be "bound" (31.5), she
recognizes no boundaries. She boasts about the power of her
gaze--technically, just the "twinckle of her eye"--to
"saue, or spill, whom she would hight" (31.6-8). Mirabella
renders irrelevant the praise of her many admiring males, who
"languish long in lifeconsuming smart, / And at the last through
dreary dolour die" (31.3-4). Mirabella needs no idolaters, as she
quite effectively idolizes herself, with stanza 31s description of her
lethal, scornful beauty ending, "What could the Gods doe more, but
doe it more aright?" (9).

Unfortunately for Mirabella, the gods answer this rhetorical
question, and their punishment exposes her own failures of containment.
She explains:

Here in this bottle ...
I put the teares of my contrition,
Till to the brim I haue it full defrayd:
And in this bag which I behinde me don,
I put repentaunce for things past and gon.
Yet is the bottle leake, and bag so torne,
That all which I put in, fais out anon;
And is behinde me trodden downe of Scorne,
Who mocketh all my paine, and laughs the more I mourn.
(viii.24)

Mirabella is sentenced to place her tears and repentance into the
bottle and bag, respectively, emptying herself into containers of her
sincere penance. However, just as she was ever unwilling to contain
herself, the vessels cannot hold the contents of her
"contrition." The same woman who once reveled in her ability
to "spill, whom she would," and would not be
"bound," now must watch as her tears spill out of the leaky
bottle and as the bag behind her fails to retain the objects of her
repentance. Quite literally, her penance cannot be fulfilled, and she
becomes an icon of what Marshall terms self-shattering. Several readers
have found Mirabellas plight a sympathetic one, as Arthur himself does,
and for good reason. She does not choose the literary culture or
conventions that shape her. She has Petrarchism thrust upon her. However
narratively complicit Mirabella may be in the deaths of her two dozen
suitors, she functions allegorically to indict the Petrarchan modes
perpetuation of self-shattering violence.

In the depiction of Serena and the cannibalistic "saluage
nation" (35.2), Spenser builds upon the meta-literary Mirabella
episode by interrogating the Petrarchan pleasures opposed to
self-containment. (36) While Mirabella epitomizes the violent
fragmentation of the self, Serenas situation demonstrates the
complementary crisis of Petrarchan violence toward the other. Spenser
presents the victimization of Serena through a horrifying parody of the
blazon, with the cannibals gazing at "Her yuorie necke, her
alablaster brest, / Her paps," and so on (42.1-2). (37) By
rendering this blazon from the perspective of the discourteous
cannibals, he compels his readers to view such Petrarchan pleasure with
suspicion, even as we may participate in that pleasure. More
specifically, the blazon becomes the artistic antipode of containment, a
poetic device fundamentally at odds with the ethical and literary
doctrine of Spenser's Hermit. As in the story of Mirabella, though,
Spenser stresses the sheer multitude of male figures implicated in the
ritual violence, and this emphasis turns our attention to a broad
cultural phenomenon, rather than the corpus of any one poet. Cantos vii
and viii, then, do not damn Petrarch so much as they detail the problems
that have sprung up in his wake.

If the Petrarchan problems depicted in these cantos were Book Vis
final treatment of the subject, it might be fair to say that Spenser
sought chiefly to undermine the Hermit's advice through
counterexamples of selves in the process of fragmenting. Book VI would
present self-containment buckling under the pressures and pleasures of
Petrarchism.38 However, Spenser continues his engagement with
Petrarchism in the pastoral cantos, where containment yields
contentment--at least temporarily. In the process, Spenser adapts
pastoral into a corrective to the violent and destabilizing effects of
Petrarchism.

CONTAINMENT, CONTENTMENT, AND CALIDORE'S COURTSHIP

Although Spenser repeatedly scrutinizes Petrarchism in the cantos
preceding Calidore's pastoral sojourn, and though the generic
implications of Pastorella's name are almost too obvious to bear
mention, scholars have not examined Calidore's courtship of
Pastorella as an interplay between the Petrarchan and pastoral modes.
(39) Many critics add Calidore's pursuit of Pastorella to their
long lists of the knight's character flaws and allegorical
shortcomings. (40) Others grant that Pastorella plays a role in
Calidore's moral education, but they do not connect these aspects
of Book VI to its meta-literary concerns about Petrarchism, even as they
note verbal or thematic echoes across the cantos. (41) Spenser does not
simply dismiss his own apprehensions about the troubling figures,
language, and effects of Elizabethan erotic poetry that occupy cantos
vii and viii. Instead, through pastoral, he once again takes up the
Hermit's model of self-containment to tackle these Petrarchan
problems head-on. Though Pastorella, as John Watkins suggests,
"embodies a genre defined in explicit contrast to epic" more
so "than any other figure" in the poem, she also becomes a
means by which Spenser counters and contains Petrarchism, "the
greatest threat to Spensers own Virgilian ambitions." (42)

Spenser prefaces Calidores courtship of Pastorella with an extended
dialogue--one that Paul Alpers says "exemplifies the best of
Spenserian and Renaissance pastoral"--effectively translating the
Hermits ethic of containment into a pastoral representation of
contentment. (43) In fact, the encounter between Calidore and Melibee
includes five uses of the word "content" within only twelve
stanzas, making it the densest use of the word in the entire poem. The
prominence of the word is not in itself surprising, since contentment is
a conventional conversation topic in pastoral literature, as critics
have long recognized. (44) However, this particular instance of pastoral
contentation takes on additional significance in light of the earlier
cantos. For example, when Melibee invites Calidore to dine with him and
his daughter, they "to it fell / With small adoe, and nature
satisfyde, / The which doth litle craue contented to abyde" (ix.
17.7-9). This contented dining reflects the Hermits simple dietary
advice. Calidore proceeds to praise the pastoral world and the lives of
the shepherds, which in turn provides Melibee with an opportunity to
elaborate on the nature of their contentment:

If happie, then it is in this intent,
That hauing small, yet doe I not complaine
Of want, ne wish for more it to augment,
But doe my selfe, with that I haue, content;
So taught of nature, which doth litle need
Of forreine helpes to lifes due nourishment.
(20.2-7)

Recalling the contentedness they experience after the meager
supper, Melibee elaborates contentment through a metaphor of
"nourishment." In contrast to Mirabella, who perpetually
empties herself into faulty containers, and Serena, whose body is
imaginatively dissected in preparation for religious cannibalism, the
shepherds experience their contentment as a process of satisfying
themselves with a small but sufficient supply of food. Melibee's
simple virtues oppose the "enuy," "pride," and
"ambition" of "great ones" that "downe
themseules doe driue, / To sad decay, that might contented liue"
(21.1, 22.2-5). Melibees account that "Me no such cares nor
combrous thoughts offend" (22.6), resulting in an undisturbed
"siluer sleepe" (8), contrasts with the restless night spent
by Scudamour at the House of Care, with the Champion of Love described
just before as having a "hart" of "gealous
discontent" (IV.v.30.7-8). More immediately, Melibee's
contented slumber is juxtaposed with Timias and Serena's insomnia
after their encounters with the Blatant Beast. The shepherds'
untroubled sleep and admirable eating practices suggest more broadly
their proper relationship to the external world. The containment so
painfully absent in the Petrarchan crises of Mirabella and Serena
provides the foundation for Melibee's pastoral contentment.

Calidore's initial failure to comprehend Melibees species of
contentment stems, at least in part, from his ulterior motive to woo
Pastorella; however, rather than interpreting this as a strike against
Calidore or Courtesy, we can identify Spenser initiating his allegory of
literary modes.45 During this conversation, Spenser provides a glimpse
at Calidore's interiority:

Whylest thus he talkt, the knight with greedy eare
Hong still vpon his melting mouth attent;
Whose sensefull words empierst his hart so neare,
That he was rapt with double rauishment,
Both of his speach that wrought him great content,
And also of the obiect of his vew,
On which his hungry eye was alwayes bent;
That twixt his pleasing tongue, and her faire hew,
He lost himselfe, and like one halfe entraunced grew.
(VI.ix.26)

Spenser portrays a complex response to the auditory and visual
stimuli of Melibee and Pastorella, respectively. Hamilton connects
Calidore's "rauishment" and "his hungry eye" to
the cannibals of canto viii, deducing that "Unlike Melibee,
Calidore is not content with what he has." (46) If so, why does
Spenser specifically use the word "content" to describe
Calidore in line 5? Does Spenser simply seek to draw attention to the
contrast between Calidore and Melibee, misapplying the word as Calidore
himself misunderstands Melibee's position? The stanza's
conclusion, with Calidore having "lost himselfe," clearly
signals that his "double rauishment" does not match the
self-containment advocated by the Hermit. However, I contend that
Spenser's use of the word "content" alongside
descriptions of a state that is clearly not contented registers Calidore
as precariously poised between two psychophysiological conditions and
literary modes, the pastoral and the Petrarchan. Melibee's pastoral
sermon contents Calidore, while the knight's desire for Pastorella
has a quite different effect, and this conflict pulls him apart
"twixt his pleasing tongue, and her faire hew." The tensions
between Calidore's responses and the interaction of the artistic
modes that those responses represent form the spine of Spenser's
literary allegory.

The first phase of Calidore's courtship of Pastorella is
admittedly quite brief--he lasts a total of two stanzas before deciding
to alter his apparel and approach--but Spenser significantly repeats
language and imagery from his earlier treatments of Petrarchism in Book
VI. For example, he describes Calidore "feeding on the bayt of his
owne bane" (34.4), helpless against "the subtile bands"
and "cruell hands" of "the blynd boy" (11.6-8).
Similarly, Calidore's efforts "to quench his fire ... did it
more augment" (34.9). Furthermore, Spenser's description of
Calidore's "queint vsage" as "fit for Queenes and
Kings" casts a sideways glance at the Petrarchan politics of the
English court, and the term "queint vsage" itself may be less
than flattering (35.2). Hamilton glosses the phrase as "elegant or
refined behavior," but the adjective "quaint" could also
mean "cunning" or "proud." In addition, the noun
"quaint" refers to "the female external genitals"
and is used several times by Spenser's Tityrus, Chaucer. (47)
Elegant or refined behavior, indeed. Although Calidore is certainly
innocent of assault in these stanzas, Spenser's language
uncomfortably recalls the savages who "vew'd with loose
lasciuious sight" Serena's "daintie parts, the dearlings
of delight" (viii.43.1-3). Inappropriately applying the Petrarchan
paradigms critiqued in the foregoing cantos, Calidore must undergo the
modal transformation befitting of his shepherdly surroundings. For
Calidore and Spenser alike, to make Petrarchism more palatable, they
must make it more pastoral.

Perhaps paradoxically, Spenser initiates this process of
containment with Calidore's removing of his armaments. Calidore
decides "To chaunge the manner of his loftie looke; / And doffing
his bright armes, himselfe addrest / In shepheards weed, and in his hand
he tooke, / In stead of steelehead speare, a shepheards hooke"
(ix.36.2-5). Though readers will inevitably remember earlier, troubling
scenes of disarming, most notably that of Redcrosse Knighte in I.vii,
Spenser more recently recalls the Hermit, who hung "vp his armes
and warlike spoyle" when weary "Of warres delight, and worlds
contentious toyle" (v.37.6-8). Moreover, Calidore had doffed his
arms less conspicuously about twenty stanzas prior, when Melibee
"him besought himselfe to disattyre, / And rest himselfe, till
supper time befell" (ix.17.3). In removing his armor, Calidore not
only sets aside the sumptuary symbols of epic romance but also shifts
away from the Petrarchism that Spenser had identified as so integral to
courtly culture. Camille Paglia argues, "Personality in Spenser is
armoured, an artifact of aggressive forging": "Armour is the
Spenserian language of moral beauty, signifying Apollonian finitude and
self-containment." (48) However, the Hermit outlines an alternative
means of self-containment that Melibee models in a life of pastoral
contentment. By bookending the plights of Mirabella and Serena with
these exempla, Spenser suggests pastoral's potential to contain and
correct Petrarchism.

In addition to Calidore's wardrobe change, Spenser disarms the
would-be lover, tempering the dangerous prospect of Petrarchan male
aggression. As long as Calidore remains content, his passions are no
threat to Pastorella or himself. Calidore exchanges his "steelehead
speere" for "a shepheards hooke," but this substitution
does not leave the hero defenseless. When a tiger attacks Pastorella
near the end of canto x, Calidore uses his trusty sheep-hook to
decapitate the beast with apparently little effort. Like Sidney's
young protagonists in The Old Arcadia, Calidore can prove his valor just
as easily in the fields of pastoral romance as in the battlefields of
chivalric romance. (49) Calidore's skirmish also recalls 1 Samuel
17:34-36, in which David cites his previous experiences of killing lions
and bears to protect his father's sheep as evidence for his ability
to defeat Goliath. The allusion links Calidore to a biblical figure for
both pastoralism and poetic authorship (by way of the Psalms), and it
anticipates the epic combat of cantos xi and xii, as well as the
knight's eventual erotic fall.

Similarly, Spenser uses pastoral to revise the conventional
Petrarchan hierarchies that undergird both the self-shattering
discontent of Mirabella and the savage nation's idolatrous desire
for Serena. In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), Spenser had
critiqued such conventions by targeting Queen Elizabeth's
Petrarchan courtiers, who "do themselues for want of other worke, /
Vaine votaries of laesie loue professe" (765-66). These courtiers
wrongly invoke Love's "ydle name," for "him they do
not serue as they professe, / But make him serue to them for sordid
vses" (789-92). By contrast, Calidore must demonstrate his devotion
through actual labor on behalf of his mistress:

So being clad, vnto the fields he went
With the faire Pastorella euery day,
And kept her sheepe with diligent attent,
Watching to driue the rauenous Wolfe away,
The whylest at pleasure she mote sport and play;
And euery euening helping them to fold:
And otherwhiles for need, he did assay
In his strong hand their rugged teats to hold,
And out of them to presse the milke: loue so much could.
(ix.37)

Sir Calidore must humble himself and perform the chores of a
shepherd, not simply dress as one. (50) Spenser captures the
significance of these simple, affectionate tasks in the final
monosyllabic line, ending "loue so much could." Furthermore,
the "diligent attent" with which he keeps the sheep aligns him
with the righteous shepherds of the Calender and Colin Clout. Finally,
though Spenser identifies Calidore's labors as a form of
"seruice" to Pastorella (x.32.6), we might note that they are
the very tasks that Pastorella herself would normally perform. Content
to embrace pastoral life with its "paines" and
"perill" (32.7), Calidore labors to establish a more equal
relationship between himself and Pastorella.

To highlight Calidore's progress in containing Petrarchism,
Spenser includes Coridon as a rival lover and foil. Whereas Calidore
starts out a Petrarchan knight who comes to exercise self-containment
through pastoralization, Coridon is a conspicuously pastoral character
whose Petrarchism is increasingly registered in terms opposed to
contented self-fortification. Like Melibee, Coridon's name comes
directly out of the pastoral tradition, with classical precedents in
Theocritus's fourth Idyll and Virgil's second Eclogue.
However, the first mention of Coridon in canto ix casts him specifically
in the role of the unrequited lover, recalling not only the rejected
lover from Virgil but, more immediately, the Petrarchan lovers of Book
VI. Coridon "burnt in" Pastorella's "loue" and
experienced a "sweet pleasing payne," causing him to
"languish, and his deare life spend," like Mirabella's
myriad deceased suitors (ix.10.3,6). As Calidore and Pastorella grow
closer, Coridon channels his Petrarchan pains into forms of
self-cannibalism:

And euer when he came in companie,
Where Calidore was present, he would loure.
And byte his lip, and euen for gealousie
was readie oft his owne hart to deuoure,
Impatient of any paramoure.
(39.1-5)

Coridon's experience of jealousy as eating his own heart
recalls the troubles of Redcrosse Knight (I.ii.6.3) and Scudamour
(IV.vi.7.5), while in biting his lip Coridon imitates the allegorization
of "gnawing Gealosy" outside the gates of Pluto and the Cave
of Mammon (II.vii.22.4-5). Moreover, Coridon perpetuates a violence
against himself akin to the rituals of the savage nation and to the
corrosive bites of the Blatant Beast. Coridon is not simply consumed by
desire but literally consumes himself, and this passionate
self-cannibalism perverts the pastoral associations between contentment
and nourishment that inform the interaction between Melibee and
Calidore.

Furthermore, Coridon's Petrarchan discontent isolates him from
the recreative community of pastoral song: (51)

then did they [the shepherds] all agree,
That Colin Clout should pipe as one most fit;
And Calidore should lead the ring, as hee
That most in Pastorellaes grace did sit.
Thereat frownd Coridon, and his lip closely bit.
(VI.ix.41.5-9)

Although critics tend to remember Colin Clout in Book VI primarily
through his presence on Mount Acidale in canto x, our initial images of
Spenser's pastoral persona within The Faerie Queene showcase his
artistic contributions to the larger shepherd community. When first
wooed by Calidore, Pastorella "cared more for Colins
carolings" (35.7), and Colin here pipes for the shepherds as
Calidore leads them in dance. Coridon's lack of romantic
fulfillment, however, locks him into gestures of self-cannibalism and a
state of misanthropy. The default Petrarchan paradigm of poet-lover and
idolized beloved leaves little room for other relationships. (52) Colins
service to the community, at odds with the lovesick shepherd's boy
of the Calender, throws Coridon's discontent into further relief.
Coridon has effectively displaced Colin as the narcissistic, unrequited
lover. As much as critics like to stress Calidore's condescension
toward Coridon, it is only through Calidore's efforts that Coridon
is brought back into proper relationship with society. (53)
Calidore's sojourn among the shepherds has repeatedly been
described as a process of withdrawal, but Spenser actually integrates
the character into a community far more than the conventional dynamics
of Petrarchan poetry--or the unusual strictures of his own epic
quest--would normally allow. (54) Through "courteous
inclination" (42.1), the pastoralized knight is able to salve the
self-inflicted wounds of the increasingly suffering Petrarchan shepherd
Coridon, who "earst seemed dead" (9), and to restore his
relationship with the community.

After Calidore rescues Pastorella, the shepherdess began to
"Coridon for cowherdize reiect, / Fit to keepe sheepe, vnfit for
loues content" (x.37.3-4), a line that Nancy Lindheim recoils from
as "simply astonishing" within Spenserian pastoral. (55)
Alpers argues that the "last line in effect renounces pastoral,
whose claim on us is precisely the acknowledgment that our condition in
love, as in other fundamental human situations, can be represented by
keepers of sheep." (56) He proceeds to claim that "Coridon
fails to be a pastoral figure (and Spenserian pastoral fails the
rustic)" because Coridon does not lead Calidore (nor, presumably,
the reader) to "reconsider what he is and what he values."
(57) In other words, Coridon is a shepherd sheared of pastoral
significance. While Coridon does indeed fail as a pastoral figure, that
failure is not a momentary one expressed in these lines, but the
conclusion of his process of Petrarchan self-violence, the culmination
of his jealous discontent. As Alpers explains, Coridon's successful
completion of a rustic activity ("Fit to keepe sheepe") does
not necessarily indicate his success as a literary pastoral figure.
Correspondingly, Coridon's failures as a lover ("vnfit for
loues content") fit with his realization of the Petrarchan mode,
insofar as erotic frustrations characterize its representative anecdote.
(58) If we interpret line 4 with reference to the larger relationship
between pastoral and Petrarchism in Book VI, we can see that the second
half of the line not only suggests the failure of a pastoral figure, but
it identifies Petrarchism as the cause of that failure. Coridon fails as
a pastoral figure insofar as he comes to represent a Petrarchan one, and
he consequently cannot experience contentment. Calidore's
Petrarchan features are contained by pastoral, but Coridon loses his
pastoral self to Petrarchism. Though Coridon may seem comically inept
and ancillary, he serves both as the spiritual successor of Colin
Clout's romantic discontent and as a foil for the containment
process enacted by Calidore.

However, Calidore's Petrarchism resurfaces late in canto x:

So well he woo'd her, and so well he wrought her,
With humble seruice, and with daily sute,
That at the last vnto his will he brought her;
Which he so wisely well did prosecute,
That of his loue he reapt the timely frute,
And ioyed long in close felicity:
Till fortune fraught with malice, blinde, and brute,
That enuies louers long prosperity,
Blew vp a bitter storme of foule aduersity.
(38)

The mutuality gestured toward during the courtship all but
vanishes, as Calidore's "humble seruice" becomes little
more than the means to fulfill a sexual end. "Till" in line 7
indicates not only temporality but causality. The romance language of
"fortune" should not prevent our recognition of Spenser's
causal language of allegory: the brigands arrive and destroy the
pastoral community because of Calidore's disruptive desires and
Petrarchism gone wild. (59) As with Timias earlier, who remained an
unnamed figure of his former self, Spenser admits the limitations of
self-containment. When Calidore's actions exceed the strictures of
pastoral contentment, Pastorella suffers at the whim of a "Fortune
not with all this wrong / Contented" (xi.2.5-6). She becomes the
"spoile" of both Calidore (x.35.8) and the brigands (40.7).

The meta-literary significance of the brigands is perhaps most
evident in the character of the criminal captain, whose "barbarous
heart was fired, / And inly burnt with flames most raging whot"
upon seeing Pastorella with his "lustfull eyes" (xi.4.1-2,
3.7). His attempts to woo her "With looks, with words, with
gifts," though "mixed [with] threats among," recall
Calidore's quaint usage at the beginning of his courtship (4.8-9).
Pastorella successfully manages the captains lustful desires to preserve
herself from rape and murder, and the captain defends her from the
rebellious brigands, who fight "as a sort of hungry dogs"
(17.1). In the chaos, "All on confused heapes themselues assay, /
And snatch, and byte, and rend, and tug, and teare," with the
reflexive pronoun suggesting both their in-fighting and self-violence
(5-6). Ultimately, these brigands both emulate the doglike Blatant Beast
and externalize Calidore's Petrarchism, which ravishes the
shepherds, distances him from Pastorella, and threatens the very fabric
of pastoral poetry. Calidore's inability to contain his desires in
the contented manner described by Melibee proves to be pastorals
undoing.

Sort of. Critics have rightly emphasized the devastation of the
pastoral world in these final cantos. (60) The description of Pastorella
"couered with confused preasse / Of carcases" (20.1-2) is
certainly one of the most disturbing images in the entire Faerie Queene.
Melibee and his wife are killed, and almost everyone else with them. We
can only hope that Colin was still on Acidale at the time of the attack.
However, I suggest that Calidore's Petrarchan relapse and the
confrontation that follows is productive within Spenser's allegory
of literary modes. The episode allows the author to maintain the value
of self-containment, even as he admits the powerful persistence of
desire. Through Calidore's defeat of the brigands and his rescue of
Pastorella, Spenser represents the hero's confrontation with his
own Petrarchism and completes Book VTs sustained engagement with its
conventions in order to advance his epic project. (61)

LITERARY MODE AND THE LEGACY OF AUTHORSHIP

Calidore does not forever forsake his epic obligations or his
Petrarchan heritage, but he does revise them through pastoral. (62) To
rescue his beloved, Calidore conceals his knightly accoutrements under
his shepherd's garb. With courtly Petrarchan armor underneath his
pastoral attire, Calidore shares a certain affinity with Colin
Clout's artistic creation on Mt. Acidale, a pastoral world with a
deep and powerful eros at its very center, signaled by the presence of
Colin's beloved among the Graces. But unlike Colin's vision,
which is one of the poem's "fragile and private myths of
seclusion," and which is ostensibly isolated to this paramount
locus poeticus, Calidore with his armor and shepherd's weeds is
able to go out into the world and resume his epic role, saving
Pastorella and completing his quest. (63) Instructed by both Melibee and
Colin Clout, with whom he passed "Long time" in courteous
conversation "With which the Knight him selfe did much
content" (x.30.2-3), Calidore is finally able to convert his
private vision into public virtue. In doing so, he translates individual
self-fortification and an ethic of pastoral contentment into martial
valor on behalf of his beloved and a species of action more appropriate
to epic poetry. In this way, Spenser both reinforces pastoral
contentment as a counter to Petrarchism and makes it instrumental to the
completion of the 1596 Faerie Queene.

Over the course of canto xi, Spenser subtly registers
Calidore's progression and the poem's return to epic
expectations through details in the knight's armaments. In addition
to the pastoral clothing that he initially uses to infiltrate and combat
the Petrarchan brigands, Calidore first acquires a "sword of
meanest sort" (42.6), with its meanness more closely approximating
the "rudest breeds" of shepherds he has dwelt among and, by
extension, the lowness associated with pastoral in dominant literary
career models of the English Renaissance (ix.45.5). Calidore
doesn't quite beat plowshares into swords, but Spenser suggests
something of that nature. However, after fending off the first wave of
brigands, Calidore finds a "sword of better say" (xi.47.5).
The sword's "say" certainly indicates its superior temper
of metal, a definition for which the OED cites this line as its only
example, but it also carries at least a hint of its linguistic
connotations, with the noun "say" available as a term for
"What a person says; words as compared to actions." (64) The
better say of the sword corresponds with Calidore's heroic
fulfillment, and Spenser's authorship, of a higher literary style.
With an appropriately epic weapon, Calidore dispatches the swarms of
thieves, whom Spenser compares to "the many flyes in whottest
sommers day / [That] Do seize vpon some beast, whose flesh is bare,
/.../ And with their litle stings right felly fare" (48.1-4).
Hamilton identifies this epic simile as an adaptation of I.i.23--only
the second epic simile in the whole poem--in which Spenser likens the
annoying assault of Errour's brood to "a cloud of cumbrous
gnattes" that "molest" a "gentle Shepheard." I
suggest further that this later simile typologically fulfills the
former. By revising this epic simile and its pastoral imagery from the
Redcrosse Knight's very first combat, Spenser marks Calidore's
ascent to the role of triumphant Protestant epic hero, able to rescue
and even resurrect Pastorella. In a sense, Calidore himself has overcome
error, and Spenser has displayed the dangers of Petrarchism run rampant.
In completing the allegory of literary modes, canto xi provides the epic
conclusion to Book VI.

Of course, there are twelve cantos in Book VI, and the final canto
comments wryly upon the epic conclusion that precedes it.
Calidore's encounter with the Blatant Beast in an isolated
monastery "reiterates his earlier withdrawal into the pastoral
world," as Joshua Phillips notes, such that the completion of his
epic task recalls the allegory of literary modes in the preceding
cantos. (65) Furthermore, insofar as the Beasts method of attack recalls
the cannibal nation and the hungrily doglike brigands, and its wounds
resemble the effects of love in this and other poems, the monster
relates not only to slander but also to the desires linked in Book VI to
Petrarchan poetics. Now that Spenser has contained the problems of
Petrarchism, Calidore can muzzle the Beast and restrain him with "a
great long chaine" (xii.34.8). But the Beast cannot be eliminated,
and its containment is only temporary. It eventually escapes through the
"fault of men" (38.8), and though Spenser does not attribute
blame to Calidore in his closing stanzas, his partial success further
qualifies the containment professed by Melibee and the Hermit. Moreover,
Spenser has also qualified pastoral by showing that, even among
shepherds, life can be poor, nasty, brutish, and short, though only in
some cases solitary. Even so, pastoral is not lost. The shepherd
community persists with Coridon and his surviving sheep. More
importantly, on his path to epic fulfillment, Calidore has incorporated
characteristics of pastoral into his literary identity. Desire may still
cry out for food, and Spenser may even admit the inevitability of a
Petrarchan snack from time to time, but this only makes the need to
"Vse scanted diet" all the more pressing, lest it consume the
self, other, and author entirely.

Taken collectively, the metapoetic episodes in Book VI comprise one
of Spenser's final commentaries on the artistic modes that defined
his authorial career and Elizabethan literary culture. As Spenser's
thematization of Petrarchism and pastoral suggests, the relationship
between the two is marked by tension, conflict, and competition, even
though (or perhaps because) they had become so thoroughly intertwined.
Through his literary allegory, Spenser seeks to reconcile these modes,
for he acknowledges the strengths, shortcomings, and seductions of each.
His attempt at reconciliation--his intervention in Renaissance
literature to contain the more hazardous features of Petrarchism--meets
with some success, as he represents in Calidore's victory over the
brigands, his short-lived reunion with Pastorella, and his temporary
triumph over the Blatant Beast. If history has the potential to repeat
itself and Spenser's epic may yet be subject to "venemous
despite" and "a mighty Peres displeasure" like the
authors "former writs" (41.1-6), then it is also possible that
the Beast can be bested once more.

In this final canto, Spenser's wrestling with Petrarchism
gives way to broader concerns about the aftermath of his own authorship.
The confrontation between Calidore and the Beast serves as a fitting
conclusion to Spenser's treatment of literary modes, but it also
allows him to shift the focus from his poetic predecessors to projected
successors. When Calidore looks into his foe's mouth, he observes
that it "seemd to containe" not just "yron teeth,"
but "a thousand tongs" that "spake reprochfully" and
"spake licentious words, and hatefull things" (26.5-7, 27.1,
8, 28.5). Attacking with speech acts, the creature evokes Errour, with
its "vomit full of books and papers" from its "filthie
maw" (I.i.20.6, 1), and thereby complements the allusion to that
battle in the preceding canto. At the same time, the Beast conjures up
the poet Malfont/Bonfont, who is punished for "bold speaches,"
"lewd poems," and generally being "a welhed / Of euill
words, and wicked sclaunders" (V.ix.25.6-7, 26.8-9). Critics
rightly interpret the Blatant Beast with respect to Spenser's
anxiety about how readers (including but by no means limited to Lord
Burghley) had responded and might continue to respond to his work.66 Yet
the Books treatment of Petrarchism makes abundantly clear that readers
can go on to become writers, revisers, poets. Although the Beast bears
some passing resemblances to Petrarchism in particular, it is better
understood as the sum total of one's literary legacy, with all the
criticism, imitators, and influence that entails. The Beast's many
voices make up a cultural conversation that can speak, shatter, flatter,
and versify in languages and words unknown to an originating author. It
is a powerful source of potentially endless creative expression, but it
can also be fearful. To the extent that Spenser shares--or at least had
shared in the past--Petrarch's laureate ambitions, he recognizes
the thin line between fame and infamy, as well as the price of ubiquity.
If he still wants his legacy to gain momentum, then he also sees the
risk of it running out of control. At the very least, he understands
that he might be shaping future generations of authors, for better and
for worse. Early in his career, such a fate was devoutly to be wished,
but by the mid-1590s the prospect may have morphed into something a bit
more monstrous. As The Faerie Queene's final combat suggests, it is
simultaneously an object worthy of pursuit and a threat that must be
contained.

McDaniel College

NOTES

I am indebted to Patrick Cheney, Ryan Hackenbracht, Joseph Parry,
and Garrett Sullivan for their insightful comments on this essay. I
would also like to thank the editors and staff of Philological
Quarterly.

(2) Heather Dubrow describes Mirabella and Serena as complementary
characters, "for the Petrarchan victimizer who scorns her lovers is
the alter ego of the Petrarchan victim who represents as well the
dangers of idolatry in the religion of love." See Echoes of Desire:
English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Cornell U. Press, 1995),
259. On the characters' shared Petrarchan significance, see also
Harry Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (U.
of California Press, 1988), 226; and Richard Mallette, Spenser and the
Discourses of Reformation England (U. of Nebraska Press, 1997), 188. For
Petrarchan readings of the characters individually, see below.

(3) The tendency to isolate the pastoral cantos from the preceding
narrative and allegory is apparent in both full-length studies of Book
VI: Arnold Williams, Flower on a Lowly Stalk: The Sixth Book of the
Faerie Queene (Michigan State U. Press, 1967), 17; and Tonkin,
Spenser's Courteous Pastoral, 112. See also Parker, Inescapable
Romance, 101-12. J. C. Maxwell labels the entire Book's structure
"episodic," in "The Truancy of Calidore," ELH 19
(1952): 143-44. Like Jacqueline Miller, I contend that the
"pastoral interlude ... actually continues and in fact intensifies
what has come before," and I locate the significance of this
continuation in the Book's treatment of literary mode. See Miller,
"The Courtly Figure: Spenser's Anatomy of Allegory," SEL
31 (1991): 58-59.

(5) McCabe writes, "the unprecedented reversion to pastoral in
book six signals no less than a radical reappraisal of the epic
enterprise" (Monstrous Regiment, 233). See also Leigh DeNeef,
"Ploughing Virgilian Furrows: The Genres of Faerie Queene VI,"
John Donne Journal 1 (1982): 151-66.

(6) Jonathan Crewe discusses "Spenser's embedding and
dissemination of Petrarchan codes in pastoral," particularly in the
Serena episode. However, though he details the canto's compelling
critique of Petrarchism, he does not sufficiently examine what in
particular the pastoral mode is able to perform for Spenser, nor does he
link it to the even more overtly pastoral content of the cantos that
follow. See Crewe, "Spenser's Saluage Petrarchanism: Pensees
Sauvages in The Faerie Queene," Bucknell Review 35 (1992): 89.

(7) For example, see Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: Lauren Silberman,
Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie
Queene (U. of California Press, 1995); Joseph Loewenstein,
"Spenser's Retrography: Two Episodes in Post-Petrarchan
Bibliography," in Spenser's Life and the Subject of Biography,
ed. Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson (U. of
Massachusetts Press, 1996), 99-130; and Joseph Campana, The Pain of
Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity
(Fordham U. Press, 2012), 163-203.

(8) See William Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell U. Press,
1994); and "Versions of a Career: Petrarch and His Renaissance
Commentators," in European Literary Careers: The Author from
Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de
Armas (U. of Toronto Press, 2002), 156; and Karl Enenkel and Jay Papy,
"Introduction: Towards a New Approach of Petrarch's Reception
in the Renaissance--the 'Independent Reader,'" in
Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and
Jan Papy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), 1-12.

(11) See Nancy Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and
Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79; and Cynthia
Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early
Modern Texts (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2002), 2, 1,74. On the need to
consider the two objects of fragmentation (the female beloved and the
male loverpoet) in relation to one another, see Teodolinda Barolini,
"The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta"
Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham
and Armando Maggi (U. of Chicago Press, 2009), 51, 368n53.

(12) Marshall, The Shattering of the Self, book title and 70. On
Spenser's response to discontinuity in Petrarch, see Alana D.
Shilling, "The Worth of the Imperfect Memory: Allusion and Fictions
of Continuity in Petrarch and Spenser," MLN 125 (2010): 1081-92.

(13) On the passions in early modern thought, see Gail Kern Paster,
Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, "Introduction: Reading the
Early Modern Passions," in Reading the Early Modern Passions:
Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Paster, Rowe, and
Floyd-Wilson (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1-20. See also Paster,
Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (U. of Chicago
Press, 2004).

(14) OED, s.v. "contain" v. 1.1.a, II.11.a, 11.10 and
II.8. On the "leaky vessel" of the female body in particular,
see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of
Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell U. Press, 1993), 23-64.

(15) I have argued for the significance of contentment for the
early modern period in Paul Joseph Zajac, "The Politics of
Contentment: Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare's As
You Like It',' SP 113 (2016): 306-36.

(20) My identification of a recurring concern with containment in
Book VI is consistent with what Eva Gold, following Harry Berger, has
recognized as Spensers use of "both a thematics and a structure of
enclosure." See Gold, "The Queen and the Book in Book 6 of The
Faerie Queene," South Atlantic Review 57 (1992): 2.

(25) As Sean Henry notes, the Hermit's "description of
the progress of the wound recalls both the process of ... and the spread
of sexually-transmitted diseases." See "Getting Spenser's
Goat: Calepine, Spenser's Goats, and the Problem of Meaning,"
Spenser Studies 30 (2015): 313.

(27) Although Timias receives the Beast's bite at Vi.v. 16, it
does not begin to take its full effect until stanza 31.

(28) This abjection follows upon Timias's success in Book III
of "living the ideal of the selfless Petrarchan lover of an
unattainable lady," despite "great difficulty and ...
considerable personal cost." See Silberman, Transforming Desire,
122; also 36-40.

(29) Barolini, "The Self in the Labyrinth of Time," 33,
37-38, 50-51.

(30) However, Corey McEleney argues that the poetic project
suggested in the Letter to Ralegh does not apply to Book VI. Similarly,
Jane Grogan claims, "Spenser s reformative didactic poetics, as
enshrined in the Letter to Ralegh, runs aground on the palliative
poetics of courtesy of Book VI." See McEleney, "Spensers
Unhappy Ends: The Legend of Courtesy and the Pleasure of the Text,"
ELFl 79 (2012): 817-18; and Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic
Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 23.

(31) The Faerie Queene VI.Pr.1.7 and 2.8.

(32) T. Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance
Literature," 262.

(34) The Petrarchan valences accrued by the Blatant Beast help make
sense of Timias's later defeat by Disdaine (VI.vii.45-49). As
Jeffrey B. Morris suggests, the narrative slots Timias into the role of
a conventional Petrarchan lover, which, I maintain, accords with his
loss of a distinct identity following the Beast's attack. See
Morris, "To (Re)Fashion a Gentleman: Ralegh's Disgrace in
Spenser's Legend of Courtesy," SP 94 (1997): 52-53.

(37) See Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser,
Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge U. Press, 1995),
137-39. On Petrarchan idolatry as undergirded by an Ovidian rhetoric of
the body, see Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to
Shakespeare (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), chap. 3.

(38) As Crewe notes, "the last minute rescue of Serena by
Calepine doesn't necessarily put an end to the problems of the
displaced Petrarchan woman" ("Spensers Saluage
Petrarchanism," 99).

(39) In addition to the link between Pastorella and
"pastoral," several critics have had more specific insights
into the significance of her name. See Michael O'Connell, Mirror
and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's The Faerie Queene
(U. of North Carolina Press, 1977), 173; Helen Cooper, Pastoral:
Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer, 1977), 164; and Patrick
Cheney, "Perdita, Pastorella, and the Romance of Literary Form:
Shakespeare's Counter-Spenserian Authorship," in Spenser and
Shakespeare: Attractive Oppostites, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (Manchester U.
Press, 2008), 121-42.

(42) John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic
(Yale U. Press, 1995), 176, 64. Similarly, Dubrow claims that
"Petrarchism, as much as pastoral, stands for that which threatens
epic action," but I suggest that in Book VI Spenser uses pastoral
to contain the excesses and dangers of Petrarchism and proceed with epic
(Echoes of Desire, 262).

(44) Hallett Smith, following Friedrich Schiller, identifies
pastoral as "an ideal of the good life, of the state of content and
mental self-sufficiency which had been known in classical antiquity as
otium." Renato Poggioli states that "pastoral poets ... exalt
the paupers estate ... because it teaches self contentment":
"the converted shepherd may find sensual delight, as well as moral
contentment, by merely satisfying his needs." Even Louis Montrose,
who influentially reads pastoral as "an authorized mode of
discontent," recognizes the centrality of its representations of
contentment, though he ultimately argues, "Pastorals that celebrate
the ideal of content function to articulate--and thereby, perhaps, to
assuage--discontent." See Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in
Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Harvard U. Press, 1952), 2;
Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral
Ideal (Harvard U. Press, 1975), 7-9; and Montrose, "Of Gentlemen
and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50
(1983): 426-27, and '"Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,' and
the Pastoral of Power," ELR 10 (1980): 155.

(51) According to Bart van Es, one of the defining features of
Spenserian pastoral is "the fellowship of the shepherds" or
the "sense of pastoral community." See "Spenserian
Pastoral," in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion,
ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (Oxford
U. Press, 2007), 85.

(52) See Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship
(Cambridge U. Press, 1998), 3. Parry describes the experience of
Petrarchan love as "the alienation of the lover from others, from
God, and from the self" ("Petrarch's Mourning," 26).

(53) On Calidore's condescension, see Alpers, What Is
Pastoral? (U. of Chicago Press, 1996), 194; Nancy Lindheim, The
Virgilian Pastoral Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era
(Duquesne U. Press, 2005), 147; and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, "The
Poetry of Conduct: Accommodation and Transgression in The Faerie Queene,
Book 6," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in
Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Cornell
U. Press, 1994), 159.

(55) Lindheim notes that the line reflects Pastorella's
perspective, but describes her here as "hardly more than the
embodiment of the pastoral ethos that her name suggests" (The
Virgilian Pastoral Tradition, 147-48).

(56) Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 194.

(57) Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 194.

(58) Gordon Braden notes that Petrarchism equates "romantic
failure and poetic success." See "Beyond Frustration:
Petrarchan Laurels in the Seventeenth Century," SEL 26 (1986): 11.
This is not to say that the subject of Petrarchan poetry is reducible to
romantic failure or that such failure cannot be used to explore other
issues.

(59) In this reading, I differ from Little, who claims that
"this figurative storm (the attack of the brigands) reads less as
punishment for love of a woman than punishment for love of the pastoral
world," even as she suggests that "these two loves are
inseparable" (Transforming Work, 185).

(61) This point is consistent with that of Douglas Northrop, who
claims that Calidore "must fight through his brigandine desires to
possess and to benefit from Pastorella in order to get beyond his
self-seeking retreat from duty." See "The Uncertainty of
Courtesy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene," Spenser Studies 14
(2000): 229-30.